Curse of Kalarel

10th game

Path to Candlekeep

Our heroes had just returned to their residence and were informed they had visitors. Gruffjaw had come to see Drogo and Paen had come to see Brúnhelga.

Drogo met with Gruffjaw and was gifted a rapier and an apology for his role in the Farnham Debacle. The rapier is magical (+1 to attack and damage) and inscribed with runes. Melhalvir was disappointed he wasn’t given any credit and grumbled that they should return to the town at some point to kill everyone in it. On his way out Gruffjaw also gave Iaini a gift – a ring with an ornate spider carved onto it. We then completely forgot about it. We shall remedy this in the next game.

Brúnhelga refused to meet with Paen so Melhalvir met with her instead. She accepted that she deserved this treatment from Brúnhelga, but asked him to pass on an apology; she felt that the way Brúnhelga had behaved during the Farnham Debacle (not getting involved in the fight, preventing a further battle between the townspeople and the party) showed that she had been wrong about her all along. So she presented her with a gift: The Mace of St Ghandi the Bloody. A very holy artifcact that gives +1 to attack and does +1 fire damage on hit. Also whilst wielding it she occasionally hears the voice of St Ghandi in her mind.

Before heading out Melhalvir decided to use the money gained in the Glubgar adventure to buy himself a better staff/arcane focus.

Everyone decided to head to Candlekeep, so slung Sheldon Lon on their horse (still unnamed) and headed off.

When at Candlekeep they were refused entry by a guard who has (quote from Dave) “the most annoying voice you have come up with yet”. He explained that they couldn’t come in without a library card. To get a library card they would have to provide Candlekeep with a valuable book that is not already in the library. However Sheldon Lon is known to them so he summoned the head librarian, Armani Darling. The androgynous Armani showered them with compliments and insisted on taking in Sheldon Lon to care for him. Armani explained that even though the PCs were so very, very beautiful the rules of the library could not be over-ruled. However recently another group of adventurers had gone off to find the fabled last book of Count Wakka and Armani knew the location they went to. The party headed off to get the book.

Once there the guys advanced through the cavern and fought a pair of carrion crawlers. As they explored further they came across a strange creature – a Flail Snail. They decided that they would not attack it as it was not coming after them. They then found a cave that had a small hut in it, glowing with a blue light. The cave was full of spiderwebs which Brúnhelga burned away with the spell continual flame (so I guess that there is a cave in the world that is constantly on fire). As Brúnhelga and Drogo attempted to open a trapdoor in the hut Iaini got bored and attacked the flail snail (as it was ever so slowly bearing down on them). It turned out to be tougher than expected and actually managed to knock Drogo unconscious; the state you go to when you are dying. Brúnhelga was halfway down the trapdoor and refused to come back out.

The party recovered from this and set off down the trapdoor after looting some magical potions from some corpses.

They found themselves in a small maze, faced with a carving of a door in a wall. After a bit of exploration they found a couple of animated suits of armour. After a battle the armour went to the door and made it real. Inside was the prize they sought – a book entitled ‘If I did it: here’s how it happened. Confessions of Count Wakka’.
Finally Iaini noticed a small plaque with the inscription ‘I have a tail and a head. I have no body. I am NOT a snake’. Brúnhelga guessed the correct answer (a coin) and a small brick pushed out of the wall. She grabbed the coin that was in there greedily.

Now our heroes just have to return to Candlekeep and get their library card.

Comments

Some other things that came out of the game. Mike suddenly realised that he always forgets to roll his Divination: Portent talent. We then forgot to roll it.
Iaini needs to find out about his new ring; we’ll go over it on the next game (and I’ll probably put a little sheet telling him what it does).
Clare is finding that she probably has too many options with her spells – basically she mostly ends up hitting people because to read all the spell cards at the table slows things down quite a bit. What we are going to do to try and make this more fun for her is change her to a Druid instead of a cleric. That means she’ll be able to turn into some animals and will change her spell layout a bit. Her backstory will remain the same but she’s a different class now. If anyone else wants to change class I’m happy to do that (basically if you aren’t finding what you are doing fun then fixing this is probably more important to me than staying to the rules). However this isn’t a double standard – if you wanted to multiclass I’d still want you to come up with an in-game reason for it.
Mike suggested that he may want to change out some of his spells as they are pretty much all combat focussed and he tends to stick with the guaranteed hit of magic missile anyway.

Mike, Clare and Dave levelled up last session, but I think that in the next one you guys will be completing quite a few quests in short order so it’s likely most of you will level. I think we can handle choosing the new spells for those that get them at the game. There aren’t that many more choices to be made so I shall probably pre-prepare next level character sheets as the increase to your proficiency bonus’ will change a lot of stuff on the sheet.